So yes there is a difference, but in your case it isn't going to help.

Excluding NULLS (or any set of values) means those rows are filtered from the data (so say you had a YoY calculation based on 2011 vs 2012, if you excluded 2011; the 2012 variance could no longer calculate, as it don't have access to the previous years numbers)

Hiding, removes those marks from the Viz, but leaved those rows in the data. So in the above example, we'd only see 2012...but the variance calculation could still be performed, as it would have access to the 2011 numbers. When we hide, and so remove the marks from view, the axis does get re-drawn to "what's in view" and not "what's in the data"...as the below gif shows

I am hoping to build a dashboard which shows a small line graph for 40 odd different dimensions; this should look like sparklines as I want to just compare the general trend for each dimension over 4 years.

The reason I wanted to add to this post is that I love your LoD to detail solution but what if I don't have data for some of the years?

For that line graph, the first year(s) won't show. Is there a way to ensure NULL appears in this scenario?

I could try and build a mock dataset to show what I mean but I just wondered if this had an easy answer.

I'm trying to show the number of registers in my dataset by category and ***. The problem is that some of the categories doesn't have a single row of a certain ***, but this data still relevant for my client, so I want this data to be displayed as zero.

You can see here that the category 'J1234' for example doesn't show the 'M' data, cause it doesn't exist in the data source. How can I display this info?

Thanks for sharing this, it really helped! Next step for me is to get this to work in a map as well. I've tried several suggestions in this thread as well as others, but so far seem to work when applied to maps.

Using the workbook you've edited earlier, I tried to convert that into a map but it loses the densification from the lookup calculation. The Technology/Jumbo Box value is still missing. Using a ZN or ISNULL functions do work when looking at a cross table but not in a map.